Gabriel spent months blaming himself — for not seeing it, for being fooled, for the specific humiliation of having his own goodness used as the lever against him.

One evening I found him in the garden where his father used to sit and read, and he asked me, without turning around, how he could have failed to see her.

“Because you were looking for love,” I told him.

“And predators count on decent people being ashamed of having trusted.

The shame is the trap.

Don’t finish building it for her.” He began seeing a counselor.

I sat with him a long time in that garden, longer than either of us said anything, because I understood that the wound was not really about Sabine.

It was about him — about the terrifying discovery that his best quality, the openness and trust that made him the man his father would have been proud of, was also the exact seam through which he could be split open.

That is the cruelest thing these people do, worse even than the theft.

They take a person’s virtue and turn it into the instrument of his ruin, so that afterward he cannot tell the difference between his goodness and his gullibility, and begins to suspect that the safest thing would be to stop being good at all.